Closing summary
It is “nonsense” for protesters outside MPs’ homes to claim they are not seeking to intimidate, James Cleverly has said. “Someone saying: ‘I’m standing outside someone’s private house in numbers, but we don’t seek to intimidate’, I’m sorry, that’s clearly nonsense,” the home secretary told the BBC’s Today programme. “Where a mob of people are outside someone’s private residence, clearly with the intention of distorting their future votes, that is unacceptable and we expect the police to deal with it.”
Shamima Begum, who left Britain as a schoolgirl to join Islamic State, has lost an appeal against the decision to remove her British citizenship. Begum travelled to Syria in 2015 at the age of 15. Her citizenship was revoked on national security grounds shortly after she was found in a Syrian refugee camp in February 2019.
Downing Street has briefed that it was “wrong” for a controversial pro-Palestinian message to be projected onto Parliament but stopped short of saying police should have intervened, PA reports. The phrase “from the river to the sea” was reportedly beamed onto the building on Wednesday as Gaza protesters descended on Westminster.
Rishi Sunak has hit out at the behaviour of protesters who he says are threatening MPs, after warnings that politicians’ safety was put at risk during this week’s chaotic parliamentary debate on Gaza. The prime minister said on Friday it was “unacceptable” for MPs to feel intimidated in their jobs, amid an ongoing row over whether the Commons speaker was right to bend parliamentary rules this week in an effort to protect MPs’ safety.
The Scottish government has announced it will provide £24.5 million to secure the investment of a Japanese firm in a Highland cable factory, PA reports. Scotland’s Wellbeing Economy Secretary, Mairi McAllan, has used her first speech in the brief to confirm the funding at an event in Edinburgh.
EU sources are playing down the significance of the new deal between the bloc’s border agency Frontex and the UK. Insiders in Brussels say the UK as an important partner of a global alliance to counter migrant smuggling. However the new arrangement with the UK is one that Frontex has with 18 different partners around the world helping to identify trends and patterns including organised crime and people smuggling.
Rishi Sunak has offered his support for protesting farmers in Wales.
Taking questions after a speech at the Welsh Conservative conference in Llandudno on Friday, the prime minister said: “You can just really tell the visceral anger amongst the farming community here in Wales about what has been done to them.
“That anger is palpable, and they have every right to be angry.
“By the Welsh government’s own assessment, their ideas are going to lead to thousands of job losses, reduce our food production and food security and destroy farm incomes.
“It just demonstrates again why their plans are the wrong ones, and the wrong ones particularly for rural Wales.
“There are farmers outside here today and they are expressing that anger and we will do everything we can, and you guys are doing a great job of highlighting that this is the reality of a Labour in power.”
